Got a lot of updates inside the game, more things coming today. Merchant Ships coming out today. We are testing it before it goes live direct in prod. It’s a new game feature that’s adding a bit more inside the game. It’s not a TB but it’s similar. This isn’t the most game-breaking thing that saves all the economics and we’ll make it better over the next month or two.
At the end of the day, we’re trying to build a sustainable ecosystem and we’re trying to make that better month by month. There’s a bunch of stuff we need to do to make that happen. One of the things we addressed this last week is… there was a large OTC Coin market happening, so we repriced coins. It’s only a bandaid solution, but these are the kinds of things we’ll be focusing on this month.
You guys know when things are broken probably better than the team does. And that’s so helpful. What we’re working on is making the game have more spend than tokens given out. And to do that, there’s a few things we need to do. We need to make the game more fun to be sustainable. We need more things where the token can be spent. We need more end-game content. End-game means what do high level players do inside the game? We need more game mechanics and fun things for high level players to do. The game needs to be more fun for the higher level, and we need more different types of items that players find valuable.
Merchant Ships is the first feature like that, that adds more end-game content. Some of the resources you’ve been earning, you don’t have to use them in the TB. You can use them in Merchant Ships to earn other things, aside from just $PIXEL. Chapter 3 will add another functionality like this with kinda competitive co-op play too.
Something else we’ll be shifting too are the live ops events. We’ve been making them so competitive. End of the game, we need to have fun content. You don’t need to be PvPing all the time. You can work together. You guys love socializing, working together, having shared common goals etc. Road map of Pixels is we’ll continue to work on these core sets of features for end-game content.
One thing we’re about to add is a withdrawal tax. It’ll be based on your reputation and semi-aggressive. We want to start to make it so people who actually want to use the token in the game are more rewarded. We’re not pocketing money if we have tax. That tax goes back into the game. We’re working on stuff where for eg. if you stake when withdrawing, you have less tax. We’re trying to align the incentives of the players and the game. There’s mutual benefits with this. Withdrawal tax is probably going live next week. Make your decisions, do whatever you wanna do now. The only way you can get the highest rep and the lowest tax is by holding more than one land probably.
The coin OTC Market - there’s more people botting the coin market than before. It led to cheaper OTC which is hurting the market. It led to some inflation and we need to start to attack some of those mechanics. We want to start attacking the coin economics of those bots. We’re still considering what it means. We might need to restrict reputation a little bit more. The current reputation adds more barriers. We don’t want to make it too hard for real players. Maybe we add optional KYC for more reputation.
The third pillar of what we’re working on is adding back more social elements. One of the things we’re really missing is social gameplay. When we worked on economy, we saw inflation drop, but in doing this, we nerfed a lot of the social features. If we want to achieve all of our goals, that was a fun piece of magic that we’re missing. We might be putting a pause on Chapter 3 for 30 days while we figure this out. There’s a lot of easy wins that we can focus on. We’re really interested in expanding the UGC system we can focus on. UGC means User Generated Content. Right now the UGC Functionality we have is all centered around decorations. Everything you see in the game, we build with our own UGC tools. One thing we’ll experiment with is to see if there’s any of that functionality that we can open up to our users. It’s one of our biggest advantages that we just have not used. In pre Chapter 1, you were able to really customize and build your farms. There’s also other asks that you guys have too. A friends list, a kudo system etc. Next 30 days, there’s gonna be a strong focus on cleaning up the economy and adding back some social stuff back into the game. Then continuing on long-term game features.
Next week we’re adding in a new FTUE as well. A whole new onboarding flow for new users. The long-term goal is to make Pixels ready to release on mobile. We can’t do that until the game is new-user friendly. I want Pixels mobile ready in about 3 months.
Staking will be going live in April, there might be some cool announcements coming out this week. Maybe more later this month. Watch out over the next day or two. We’re trying to position the token as a multi-game token. We’re missing something in the fundamentals when it comes to the market. Markets can be irrational sometimes. There’s plenty examples of stocks that are overvalued but stay that way for so long. There isn’t really a strong belief in the single-game token narrative either. So there’s an interesting use-case where Pixels can go a little further on the publishing side and be positioned as a multi-game token.
Another thing we’re working on too is a decentralized publishing model, which will be captured by our staking. Staking should go live mid-April. We’ll release the whitepaper on the day staking goes live. Or we don’t release the whitepaper.. it should be simple to understand. Games will reward you for helping them get $PIXEL needed for them to grow inside the game.
Core game is being worked on so intensely by the internal team. We have long-term goals for the core game loop, but also for the Pixels Ecosystem as a whole. But don’t worry - core game is being worked on. Pixels should be the flagship game that proves the other stuff is working. It’s not strong ecosystem stuff if the core game isn’t performing. If we do this ecosystem stuff right, and build the core game right, there’s a big potential flywheel.
Q: How much does this event (Merchant Ships) contain gamba factor, supposed Whales will be angry if they don’t get much out of it
A: This is not an event. It’s a new feature that’ll be in the game forever. This is not a live ops event, it’s a permanent new addition to the game.
Q: Luke this merchant ship will not affect Pixels Pool? For TB?
A: We’re going to experiment with adding some $PIXEL to merchant ships just to see how it goes. TB is a good system, but it should not be the only system inside the game. That’s one of the faults of Pixels. It’s the only thing to do. I will not promise that it wont affect TB. The intention is to have players want things other than $PIXEL. If we see a ton of success, then players want things MS has to offer. We’ll add some $PIXEL rewards to see if that changes things a little bit but it’s experimental too.
Q: Can you replace the taskboard completely then with this? is that possible?
A: Who knows, maybe it’ll be the most successful thing ever and people will just ditch the TB. One thing that we’re talking about a lot is other features. We’re talking about the Barney Bazaarn feature as a permanent thing in the game too. Chapter 3 is not as crazy as an economic change as Chapter 2 was. Chapter 3 will be centered around late stage gameplay. Adding in more features like MS but more involved. It adds more gameplay that way too. I’m always looking for more things to do aside from just TB.
Q: You want us to want those?
A: Well yeah, we do. If we’re not seeing as much use of this feature, then we have to rethink the rewards. The easiest way to make rewards inside of the game is to build out fun gameplay. We want to make the game sustainable, and have other rewards players actually want. So we need more features besides just TB.
Q: Add quicksilver as one of the rewards from Merchant Ships
A: There’s more things coming. There’s going to be more types of rewards. There’s new boosts coming, like the tikis.
Q: DIdn’t you guys say you were partnering with another game/project soon?
A: Maybe
Q: I love the data approach of pixels, wondering if you are open to partnering with games outside of Ronin (on Sombia exmpl), my team would love to share data in exchange for “sustainable economics” tech
A: It’s funny because people were clowning me in the last AMA saying who would want that, and how Pixels sucks at this. But yeah I’ve been shocked at how few teams in Web3 have a Data Scientist team. I understand why a lot of teams dont have it. It’s hard and expensive. It’s not something a normal beginning team can staff. We’ve been lucky. But it’s a service we can offer to other teams. We’re pretty open to working with everyone. P2E is bigger than Pixels. We want to help any team figure out how to build out P2E. The really cool thing about working with other games is they might have a better game economy than Pixels had. We had to fix Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 game economy. Some teams have that figured out better than we did. So yeah, hit us up. My (Luke’s) DMs are open for this kind of stuff.
Q: How do you plant to implement pixels into the new pets game. Considering it’s supposed to be for casuals. How will they buy pixels with no wallets?
A: Pets app is moving along. It has mini-games. You’re not gonna need a wallet to start to play the game. You only have to add a wallet (or your Pixels account) after the game if you wanted to claim rewards. One team that has nailed this experience recently is Pirate Nation. Pirate Nation has a way to buy their VIP subscription with Pirate or with Credit Card. You buy the Pirate with credit card, and they have good UX for buying on-chain items with Credit Card. The pets app needs a bit more polish right now. We plan to full-go-to-market release mid-June. There’s a social experience. This game isn’t supposed to be super competitive. There’s leaderboards with your friends, and friends of friends. This is the kind of app that you play with really close friends or your crush. It’s supposed to be fun. And web3 elements on top of it. But it’s not for earning. The intention later on is to integrate your pet nfts into this game. Rewards will be oriented towards social features or gated behind pet nfts.
Q: I wanna socialize more in pixels
A: We agree. We went over that earlier in the AMA. We know it’s something we’re missing right now, and we have urgency to bring some of those features back right now. If we spend a little more time digging through, and just working on some of the current issues in front of us, then we should be able to get to social elements again.
Q: When hunting and fishing in pixels or are you afraid of PETA
A: Guys, when chickens started dying in the game, people were upset. Also… there may be a small fishing component coming into the game. Just a small one..
Q: Is merchant fleet releasing today?
A: Maybe. Maybe it wont.
More updates, more often, more urgency on the team. It’s a more fun time to be building. Market does what market does in the short term. I know a lot of people are scared about where Web3 gaming is right now, but I think everyone’s here because you believe. This team is trying their best to make it happen. There’s fun stuff coming, and the team is still doing these AMAs, still shipping, still building.
So many exciting things happening!!!
told you IT has started!